Thinking about the Libor scandal and the possible role of Ed Balls in this fiasco today, I reminisced a little in writing, as follows...
I was standing on some steps in London,
not far from Grey's Inn- the legal college. It had been a fairly
eventful visit to a friend who was just starting his career in the
Foreign Office. It was about 2002. His fiancee had just given me a
tour of the Inn where she was pupilled. At least, I think that's how
it was. It's funny that when you say aloud to someone that you both
should remember this moment and what was said and where, it should
become so hazy. Yet in my mind at the time there was a sort of
desperate certainty that made this act of conscious marking both
necessary and seemingly futile. By saying 'remember this moment' I
made the moment a haze, but I remember the content of what I wanted
to say; it was a nice round package then and remains so now, as dumb
as an improvised explosive device.
The content of it was not related
directly either to law or to foreign affairs. Inapt was a word I
could use for it. It was a statement out of synchronization with the
times we were living in or the people we then were. I was criticising bankers; I was criticising
Gordon Brown. I said that together they would make a disaster from
the City and bring the country to economic catastrophe. House prices
were pumped, interest rates sedated, profits on steroids and bonuses
on Red Bull. It was all a word which I didn't yet know- a FUBAR. If I
had known the word FUBAR in the sense of understanding what it meant
I would have applied it to Brown's Britain, which was led by Blair
but underwritten by the crazy gold selling interest rate calming end
of boom and bust great moderation nonsense espoused most notably by
Gordon Brown, Chancellor and master doom-distiller from Kirkaldy.
And I was right. The End.
